Cheese Sauce
1 Tablespoon Fat 1 Tablespoon Flour (Rice) or 1/2 Tablespoon Cornstarch 1 Cup Milk 1/4 Teaspoon Salt Few Grains Pepper 1/2 Cup Cheese Cut Fine Melt fat; add flour or cornstarch; stir until well blended, then add milk and cook two minutes. Add cheese and seasonings, stirring well until cheese is melted. Serve on toasted slices of bread or over poached egg on toast.
A plain white sauce enriched with cheese, written for a cook who was expected to know what "fat" meant in her own kitchen. A few notes make it behave.
- The fatButter is the obvious choice and gives the best flavor; the original leaves it open because bacon drippings, beef fat and vegetable shortening were all in daily use. One tablespoon of fat to one tablespoon of flour to one cup of milk is a thin white sauce, meant to pour.
- Rice flour and cornstarch"Flour (Rice)" means rice flour, which was stocked in period pantries and still works; wheat flour can stand in at roughly the same quantity, though rice flour thickens a little more strongly. Cornstarch is used at half the quantity because it thickens roughly twice as strongly, and it sets up glossier and slightly gelatinous when cool.
- Cook the flour longer than two minutesTwo minutes after the milk goes in is barely enough to hydrate the starch, and wheat flour in particular will taste raw and pasty. Let it come to a bare simmer and cook three to five minutes, stirring, before the cheese goes in.
- Cheese off the heatThis is the hinge. Pull the pan from the burner before adding the cheese and stir until it melts in the residual heat. Boiling a cheese sauce breaks the emulsion and you get stringy curds in a thin liquid.
- What cheeseHalf a cup cut fine is about 2 oz. A firm aged Cheddar or a dry American cheese of the sort a household of the period bought by the wedge is right; grate rather than cube for faster, more even melting. Pre-shredded cheese is coated with anti-caking starch and thickens the sauce further.
- YieldAbout one cup of sauce, enough to dress four slices of toast or four poached eggs. It thickens noticeably as it cools and can be loosened with a spoonful of milk over low heat.
This is the standard American white sauce of the domestic-science era with cheese stirred in, and its presence in a bride's cook book is the whole point: white sauce was taught as a formula, not a recipe, with fixed ratios for thin, medium and thick versions that a new housekeeper memorized once and then varied forever. Fannie Farmer and the Boston Cooking School curriculum did much to standardize those proportions in print, and books aimed at young wives repeated them. Serving it over toast or a poached egg reflects the period's habit of building light suppers and invalid meals out of a sauce, an egg and bread, which is also where dishes like Welsh rarebit and creamed eggs on toast sit. Rice flour appears as an alternative, though the page itself gives no reason for the substitution.</p>